Hit-run Driver Takes Boy`s Life, Leaves Heartache

February 16, 1992|By Ardy Friedberg and Kevin Davis, Staff Writers

The hands on Gary Potts` watch were crushed against the smashed crystal, stopped forever at 10:13.

Gary was wearing the watch, a gift from his parents, when he rode his bike about four miles to a girlfriend`s house near Deerfield Beach on Feb. 4. As he headed home that night, the 17-year-old was rammed by a hit-and-run driver in the 2600 block of Southwest 10th Street.

The boy`s bike was crushed under the car`s wheels, then thrown to the side of the four-lane road. His lifeless body, tossed 90 feet by the impact, landed in the grass by the side of road. A black sneaker lay in the curb lane near broken glass and the mangled 10-speed bike.

The driver didn`t bother to stop. May not even have slowed down, despite damage to the right front portion of the Jeep-type car.

Gary Potts Sr., a former cop, put the cremated remains of his son in a mausoleum vault in Indianapolis last week.

``You can`t describe the feeling of losing your oldest son, especially your namesake,`` Potts said. ``I keep thinking about his Yankees baseball cap. It was the essence of him. He wore it to bed.``

Potts said his son, a student at Deerfield Beach High School, had problems in the past, but had been doing great recently.

``I went through the running away and wild little street kid phases`` with him, Potts said. ``But the last six months he was perfect. His whole world was just opening up for him.``

The memorial service for Gary was a proud moment for his father.

``I looked out over the church and his friends were all there,`` Potts said. ``They were old and young, white, black, Hispanic. That`s the kind of kid he was. All the neighbors are tore up. Everybody is out looking.``

Neighbors and friends printed reward posters and distributed them door-to- door, Potts said. They got store owners to put them in windows.

``I`ve got some weirdo around out here. If he did it once he can do it again to someone else`s kid,`` Potts said.

The boy`s body, his neck broken, was found by Mike Martin, an off-duty Fort Lauderdale police officer.

``Martin came by the house the other night to offer his condolences,`` Potts said. ``He told us Gary was lying in a soft spot on the grass and wasn`t in any pain. That was awful nice of him.``

Police are looking for the driver of a medium- to dark-blue four-wheel-drive- ty pe vehicle with tinted windows.

``It would have been a lot easier if he had stopped,`` said Broward Sheriff`s Deputy Matthew Gorman, a traffic homicide investigator. ``Right now, he`s thinking, `Should I turn myself in? What are the consequences? What`s going to happen to me?` The driver worsened the situation by leaving the scene and not helping the victim. Everything could have been worked out had he stayed.``

Potts has his own view of the hit-and-run driver.

``This had to chew him up alive. That guy died the same time Gary did,`` Potts said. ``The other night I sat on the end of the couch crying. Then I thought he was probably crying, too, if he has any conscience at all.``

The boy`s mother, Cindy Potts, takes a harder line.

``I want him brought to justice, to never drive again,`` she said.

But she holds warm memories of her son.

``I was with him all day that last day. We had a good day,`` Cindy Potts said. ``Thank God, we never went to bed without a hug for each other, no matter how bad the day. It would have been terrible to have ended on an argument.``